I think this one — a photo of “Gummy Vampires” candy that I took at the grocery store the other day — speaks for itself. I don’t associate gushing or oozing or even “gumminess” with vampires…but with their victims. Indeed, the first thing I think of when I think of vampirism is “teeth” not gums. Although this product is clearly targeting children, it still reflects the typical transference we see in uncanny packaging, where the act of consumerism is projected into the product, fraught with contradictions and fantasy.

This has been in the back of my mind lately. Inspired a creepy twitter poem, even:

“Vampire Gums”: he looked down with strange relief and terror — / a loose tooth left behind / weirdly twitching / still gnawing in her neck

ENERGY (1970): Cover of the “obscure Japanese” journal that first published Mori’s “The Uncanny Valley”

I like to think I’m good at keeping up with research on the Uncanny, but somehow I missed an important event this June: IEEE Spectrum published the first complete English translation of Masahiro Mori’s highly influential article on “The Uncanny Valley” (originally published in what they call “an obscure Japanese journal called Energy in 1970,” and circulating in the robotics community and popular culture in only partial form. This current translation, by robotics experts Karl F. MacDorman and Norri Kageki, has been authorized and reviewed by Mori himself.

Mori’s “Uncanny Valley” theory suggests when a human-like object approaches humanness, there is a point where we respond with repulsion.

Here are my initial notes as I read Mori’s article in full:

+ Movement has a more significant role in the theory than I think people who work with this theory really recognize. In the introduction to the essay, he makes the stunningly simple point that “many people struggle through life by persistently pushing without understanding the effectiveness of pulling back. That is why people usually are puzzled when faced with some phenomenon that this function (an algebraic equation for “monotonically increasing” or accelerating forward movement) cannot represent.” In other words, the “uncanny” is referring to the “puzzling” phenomenology of feeling “pulled back” from a situation where we expect forward motion. I like this, as it gives me another way of thinking of the “double-take” that I associate often with das Unheimliche.

+ Death is conceived as the end of movement. In the end of Mori’s article, he associates this “pulling back” with death itself: “into the still valley of the corpse and not the valley animated by the living dead.” He even goes so far as to theorize that the repulsion of the uncanny is “an integral part of our instinct for self preservation…that protects us from proximal, rather than distal, sources of danger.”

+ One shouldn’t forget that the “Valley” is always symbolic, a metaphor for a sensation. I am struck by Mori’s reliance on metaphors throughout the article…and reminded that the very idea of the “valley” is really a geographic analogy for a dip in his infamous graph. The “sinking feeling” one associates with a dip in the road or the sudden plunge of a roller coaster might be just the right sensation he is after in this. He directly compare the “uncanny valley” to an “approach” of a hiker climbing a mountain who must sometimes traverse “intervening hills and valleys”. Mori thesis statement encapsulates this in a nutshell: “I have noticed that in climbing toward the goal of making robots appear like a human, our affinity for them increases until we come to a valley which I call the ‘uncanny valley'” (emphasis added).

+ Aesthetics and childhood factor into this theory as much as Freud’s. Mori notes that the trend for designing robots that look human really started to pick up in toy robots, rather than in the (perhaps more frightening) factory robots that replace human workers. Obviously, the aesthetics mean more than the instrumental functions of these toys, which are like Freud’s puppets or uncanny dolls. Interestingly, Mori writes that “Children seem to feel deeply connected to these toy robots” and puts them on the top of the first “hill” before the chart dips down toward the deadly “uncanny” valley. What I would note here is that Freud conceives of the uncanny as a return of a repressed or infantile belief that such objects as toys and dolls have life all their own. After the dip of the “uncanny valley” Mori returns to toys by citing the “Bunraku Puppet” as an example. So perhaps Mori’s chart actually follows Freud’s logic to the letter — the dip or valley is the return of the repressed, insofar as it follows the same chronological structure of childhood belief, followed by its later return in adulthood.

+ The focus on hands, rather than faces or heads, is intriguing. Mori focuses on the robotic hand as his primary example: “we could be startled during a handshake by its limp boneless grip together with its texture and coldness…the hand becomes uncanny.” Later Mori develops this by describing a robotic hand as prosthetic limb: “…if someone wearing the hand in a dark place shook a woman’s hand with it, the woman would assuredly shriek.” Note that Sigmund Freud’s original article on the Uncanny (1919) features examples of dismembered limbs and hands that “move of their own accord” as well. The hand is a particularly loaded body part: it is a way we communicate by sign, it is one of the ways that “human” is separated from other members of the “animal” kingdom (by opposable thumb), and it is something we look to as a signifier of intention. Language is rooted in the hand. And it is a metaphor for control (i.e. having everything “in hand”). The Uncanny, as I think of it, is often a phenomena that disorients us and — often as if by an “unseen hand” — reminds us of our lack of mastery in a situation where we normally would presume we had it.

+ As Mori progresses to unpack his theory, the more his descriptions of prosthetic devices become akin to horror fiction. Indeed, he makes the comparison himself: “Imagine a craftsman being awakened suddenly in the dead of night. He searches downstairs for something among a crowd of mannequins in his workshop. If the mannequins started to move, it would be like a horror story.” Indeed, the surprising movement where one expected stillness from the inorganic objects would be startling and felt as uncanny. It would not merely be identity confusion. It would feel as if the robots were attacking. The boundaries between “story” and reality would become blurry. Science would become science fiction “made real.”

I’m sure I’ll return to this article again in the future. For now, of equal interest is Kageki’s contemporary interview with Mori himself also published in the 2012 issue of Spectrum, asking him to look back on the theory. My favorite moment is the when Kageki asks him, “Do you think there are robots that have crossed the uncanny valley?” Mori suggests that the HRP-4C robot is one of them. But then he doubles back and says “on second thought, it may still have a bit of eeriness in it.”

I am so thankful to Mori and the translators for re-releasing this version of the article in English for scholarly review. It has been relatively frustrating to see the essay referred to so often in both the design and gaming community — as well as in scholarly circles — without having access to the complete source, and now that it is available I hope others will continue to test and explore its legitimacy as a way of thinking about horror aesthetics and anthropological design.

I have to laugh whenever I see this snowglobe of Sigmund Freud, which is on a shelf in my campus office. This came to me from my old friend from graduate school, Bill Hamilton, who picked it up during a trip to Vienna last year, when he visited the Sigmund Freud Museum among other things.

What an odd choice for a kitschy ball of faux-snow! The figure inside is hard to determine as Freud, but I like to imagine it is Freud wearing ski goggles. Or a character from Futurama.

A colleague once asked me if that was cocaine swirling around his head.

The snowglobe is hilarious, as all snowglobes are.

The other day I took the above photo because the look of it got me thinking about snowglobes themselves — balls of glass that swirl powder in a watery shell to create a three-dimensional snowfall scenario. It’s impossible not to think of Citizen Kane or childhood or giftshops. To me they seem to imply a moment “frozen in time” — much like a photograph — yet not still… in persistent motion. The snowfall effect, when it works correctly, and sustains a well-balanced drift over time, aligns the device with the “automaton.” Yet we must shake them to stir them to life — these are not robots with on-off switches.

Indeed, the snowglobe is unerringly physical in nature…seemingly alive, in that it is a globular, fragile vessel that contains liquid, despite its hard glass shell. It is fascinating to watch people make this odd gesture — the shaking of a snowball — and to see the change that momentarily comes across their features — the frustration or fear or desire on their faces. Some shake them violently. Some gently disturb the glass for fear of dropping it. Some swish them like brandy; others twist them upside down and up again with violent abandon. There is something going on there, some kind of wish fulfillment and dread, in that strange moment when they grasp and disturb the contents of the globe, followed by the look of hope in their eyes as they hold it up to the light.

I always want the snow to keep moving, so I never have to shake the globe again. But gravity always wins.

The snowglobe is always reminiscent of death until it is shaken into life. In this way it has the aura of the uncanny.

It is no wonder, then, that they are objects of kitsch commodity fetishism in popular culture. Every gift shop sells them, even when the objects in the globe have absolutely nothing to do with snow, winter, or white powder in any way. Their “liveliness” promises for a price to allow you to magically bring a memory back to life, through this fetish object that stands in for the memory. We just think of them as toys, but they are deceptively more like dreams. Nay, they are more akin to crystal balls than toys.

STRANGE RAIN is a new iphone/ipad application (aka “app”) by Erik Loyer at opertoon.com that, simply, simulates looking through “a skylight on a rainy day.” Rain falls from the cloudy abyss “above” the viewer to splatter down on the glass of the device. Tilt the device and the atmosphere tilts back, too, maintaining a 3-dimensional appearance that makes it genuinely feel like you are looking up through a portable, handheld window into a sky. You can make gestures with your fingers and cause the rain to gather into a column that follows your fingertips. You can tap on the glass and make music…and words begin to flash in “whispers” beside the raindrops…or, if set to “story” mode, the words appear in complete phrases, in errant but profound micro-musings, evoking a narrative (see Holly Willis’ review at KCET for a description of the ‘story’). The game encourages interactive finger-tapping and dragging as it plays musical notes with each touch. Tap quickly, and you “fall in” to the sky, as the clouds above become framed by other clouds…and still more frames of clouds, cascading and creeping in around the edge of the screen, frame inside of frame inside of frame….

It’s a very mellow, hypnotic kind of 21st century phantasmagoria. Words can’t describe it as well as the sample video on their website:

The app is quite simple, even monotonous to a degree, but it seems to be surprisingly popular for what amounts to an interactive haiku (Apple featured it in their Entertainment category, and it hit #1 on Jan 14th). I usually don’t buy these kinds of “eye candy” sorts of things, but there are times when it’s worth it to just kick back and relax with a computer/device and see where the muse takes you. There’s something very “zen” about this sort of application — and as Fast Company points out in their review, there are already a host of other “ambient meditation aids” out there in the ipad/iphone market — and we’ve also had New Media Poetry and other forms of Electronic Literature for decades now — but there’s more to the attraction than its successful application of this genre on the ipad platform. On his blog, the app’s author, Erik Loyer, once referred to this approach to gaming as prompting “casual significance” — taking “a stab in the dark, doing things you’d like to build theories around but shouldn’t, and as such they enable you to walk into the unknown with joy and confidence.” Creative minds need to do that. But that wasn’t the entire draw for me: when I read the description of the app, I immediately noticed how it employed the language of the uncanny, and had to give it a try:

Strange Rain…feels as if you’re holding a living window in your hands. The more you touch, however, the more strange the rain becomes: layered skies, visual anomalies and shifts in speed and color, even the occasional cataclysm if you’re not careful. Before your eyes and beneath your fingers, the familiar becomes strange, and the strange, familiar.

Any reader of Freud would recognize the opposition of the familiar and strange as unheimlich — and it is precisely the tropes of the uncanny, rendered interactive (“beneath your fingers”), which make this “living window” so curiously appealing.

Instructions for Estrangement in Strange Rain

Though the game subtly plays off our instinctive “sky is falling” kind of fear, virtual rainfall in itself is not so disturbing. Yet the effect is uncanny. In a review at iphonefreak.com, Andy Boxall compares the app to a David Lynch film, and in the process nails the reason why: “The oddness comes not only from the appearance of the rain falling from inside your device upwards, but from the discordant tunes you can make while tapping the screen.” Let’s talk about these two elements — the visual and the aural — to probe into what makes this app so “strange.”

In Strange Rain, the world is rendered topsy-turvy because we are so habituated toward thinking that the sky is always fixed in a position up above us. Gravity is a natural law for us. Click on this app with an ipad down on your lap or desktop, and suddenly the world has been turned upside-down, fostering a minor sense of acute weightlessness. “Rain” still “falls” in a natural way, but it does not so much fall down on you as fall at you. This feels a bit threatening, sure, and the inversion of our perspective on the world is felt as threatening because it challenges our sense of mastery over the environment. But that threat is offset by a larger fantasy of control over the environment, too: we can “magically” manipulate — nay, orchestrate — the rain with our fingertips. And who hasn’t wanted to control the weather? Or, to quote the game’s tutorial, “reset the world”?

Yet at the same time, the glass is a persistent barrier in this relationship, and the use of cascading frames as you probe deeper into the game persistently reminds the player that the window remains a medium that enables this “control” but at the same time blocks the user from really ever touching or feeling the water and other elements implied by the game’s diegesis. This is why the music — a pling-plongy waltz of notes that change tempo when you tap — is so important, “framing” the experience as an aesthetic one, set to a soundtrack in the foreground, while the “ambient” sound of rainfall is pushed sonically into the background. Diegetic and extra-diegetic elements compete in a way that render the familiar elements of nature (rainstorm/sky) strange (mediated by sounds/images/words). There is a play, too, between what is pre-programmed and what is randomized by the user, as well as between the inescapability of gravity vs. the mobility of the app, which generates oppositional tension: the game flip-flops the fantasy of mastery over the environment with the feeling that the environment is master over the user.

Perhaps the oppositional tensions I have been describing are a common structural element to most interactive handheld games, but the aesthetic framing of this one explicitly puts such issues in the context of a subjective fantasy about the natural environment, where “thoughts” are projected directly onto the sky. I am reminded of the way we often imagine we see uncanny shapes (animals, faces) in random cloud formations. The uncanny is never really just about “scary” objects, but about the projective fantasies we have that seem to “come to life” with more power than we imagine they might have. Strange Rain dramatizes this fantasy in a contemplative and mesmerizing way.

Visit Erik Loyer’s “Generous Machine” site for more of his projects, which include interactive comics and other ‘virtual windows.’

Strange Rain was also recently reviewed in-depth by CNN, who raises the question, “What exactly is it?” The answer: a postmodern phantasmagoria of the popular uncanny.

“It is not a toy,” [VP of Marketing] Clarkson says, “but this is the closest you can get to real pet ownership without the hassles or responsibilities of owning a real pet.” — journalgazette.net

“In 2005, Perfect Petzzz® generated more than $20 million in retail sales in its first full year of operation. In fact, the Perfect Petzzz cart program was named the most successful new product concept in 2005. With the overwhelming demand for these lifelike puppies and kittens, we’ve seen other companies try to produce imitations.” — CD3 Press Release to PP Mall Dealers

Perfect Petzzz are stuffed animals that breathe. The autonomous movement of their fur — controlled by a battery-powered engine you don’t expect to be there — is enough to trick the eye into presuming that the puppy or kitten curled up on the floor is actually a living, breathing, pet. Cute, and perhaps attractive to your hand’s caress, until you touch it and realize it’s not real. Then you are startled and the toy enters the already doll-crowded realm of the popular uncanny.

Of course, the Perfect Petzzz (the ”zzz’s” are for snoring) are plastic. And therefore the animal it represents is literally as dead as it looks, with its eyes closed and body stiffened into a disturbing fetal curl. It should not move, but it does, and it is this representation of death-stirred-to-life — of the presumed inanimate object surprising us with its animation — that gets our reaction. The tricky switcheroo of statuses between familiar and unfamiliar spin the roulette wheel of certainty: the domesticated animal is rendered un-familiar (stuffed, inanimate) then restored to a heimish (cozy) status of sleeping and napping..

It is surely cute, and there is little difference between a breathing stuffed animal and a toy doll that burps or blinks. Of course, even the cutest of dolls are inherently uncanny in the way they are semblances, pale imitations of life…but the creepy thing in this case is not so much its status as automaton, as the fact that this “sleeper” never wakes up. These are comatose pets…and that, perhaps, is what makes them so “perfect.” Like the commodities these organic creatures have become, our domesticated pets are “perfect” when they are behaved, controlled, and easily replaceable after they expire. Even more, these plastic pals are simulacratic forms of taxidermy (and surely a savvy taxidermist has already borrowed the motor or at least the concept for an experiment or two). Another form of death, fantastically alive through the magic show of animism, nostalgia and fantasy. Living, breathing, death.

On the Uncanny . . .

A great deal that is not uncanny in fiction would be so if it happened in real life; and in the second place, there are many more means of creating uncanny effects in fiction than there are in real life.